Before music becomes music—before it's played by musicians—it's just ink on a page. Some compositions require a great deal of ink and a lot of pages, hundreds of carefully-drawn notes bound into massive tomes of score-paper. And yet it's worth remembering that some of the greatest compositions of all time were born of… »9/23/13 10:30pm 9/23/13 10:30pm

Jazz trumpet genius Miles Davis had a lot of things going for him. He had a unique musical intelligence, an unparalleled instinct for musical innovation, and a reserved sense of compositional control that set his music apart from the many trumpeters of his day. And yet when you asked people to list his positive…
»7/19/12 8:45pm 7/19/12 8:45pm

And so with one last musical interlude, Shinichirō Watanabe's marvelous anime Kids on the Slope concluded its 12-episode run. Kids was something truly special—a nostalgic, dream-like tribute to friendship, love, and the mysterious power of music. »7/05/12 9:00pm 7/05/12 9:00pm

I was a band kid in high school. (This is probably not a surprise to readers of Kotaku Melodic.) I tried on a lot of hats in middle school—I tried being an athlete, tried being a brain, tried being involved in student government. But it was in the jazz band that I found a home. »5/31/12 8:00pm 5/31/12 8:00pm

Look, I'm under no illusions about jazz music's unpopularity. I grew up playing jazz, went to school to study jazz, made a living as a jazz musician for a while out of school. Jazz is beautiful, jazz is the best. And people, by and large, don't care about it at all. »5/24/12 8:30pm 5/24/12 8:30pm

It's widely held that Miles Davis' 1959 album
Kind of Blue »3/29/12 8:15pm 3/29/12 8:15pm is the greatest jazz album of all time. I believe that in some jazz style-manual or another, it is actually required that people who write or talk about it refer to it as a "seminal."

Did that headline get your attention? Good, because you should go and read this super-cool piece by Kill Screen's Lana Polansky about mechanics, practice, saxophone, jazz, and Street Fighter. (It also features the amazing illustration above, drawn by Daniel Purvis.) »12/20/11 9:30pm 12/20/11 9:30pm

Courtesy of the fine folks at Reddit, we've got a video of YouTube user (and pianist) live4divin, who performs a jazz reharmonization of Jeremy Soule's main theme from Skyrim. For non-musicos, reharmonization is when you take an established melody (say, "All The Things You Are") and write new chords to go underneath… »12/09/11 6:40pm 12/09/11 6:40pm

Folks who spent up to $100 for War for Cybertron preorder codes on eBay are going to kick themselves, as a listing on the Xbox website for the game's first map pack indicates that all three preorder characters are included. »7/02/10 1:20pm 7/02/10 1:20pm